When Chelsea Smith heard the Backstreet Boys were coming to Toronto, she had a simple message for the five men who soundtracked her childhood.
“Here’s my credit card, take all my money.”
The 35-year-old Vancouver fan wasn’t bluffing. Having already travelled to Las Vegas to see her teenybopper crushes, she’s now preparing to fly across the country for two Toronto concerts, spending roughly $600 on tickets alone.
And she’s hardly the only millennial willing to pay a tidy sum to party like it’s 1999.
Nearly three decades after their commercial peak, the Backstreet Boys have booked a staggering 12 shows at Toronto’s Rogers Centre in 2027, citing “overwhelming demand.” The run doubles the venue’s previous record of six shows, set by Taylor Swift during her Eras Tour in 2024.
While some current major artists are cancelling tours amid sluggish ticket sales, the once-baggy-jeaned quintet is proving nostalgia is a hell of a drug.
“I haven’t seen a Top 40 artist in so many years,” says Smith, a self-described “Y2K-era girlie” who made two trips to the Backstreet Boys’ Las Vegas Sphere residency last year.
She suspects millennials are seeking comfort in the past.
“I feel like during COVID we all retreated back to our nostalgia,” says the customer support professional.
“Times are tough. You’re going back to when it was simpler and just living in that moment.”
WHEN QUEEN STREET WENT BACKSTREET
Bill Welychka remembers when the Backstreet Boys could bring downtown Toronto to a standstill.
At the height of the boy-band craze in the late ’90s, the former MuchMusic VJ watched thousands of screaming teenagers descend on the channel’s Queen Street West headquarters, hoping to glimpse the five American heartthrobs.
“There were certain bands where we knew we’d have to hire security, where we would have to close the street down. The Backstreet Boys were certainly one of those bands,” he recalls.
“I think they fed off of that energy and the applause and the screams and the tears.”
The Toronto residency is dubbed “Into the Millennium — Homecoming: Live in Canada,” fittingly so: Canada was the first North American market to embrace the group.
Welychka remembers the frenzy spreading from Europe to Quebec, then across Canada, with MuchMusic putting their videos into heavy rotation.
“We latched on to them very, very early on,” he says.
But the boy-band bubble eventually burst. As tastes shifted in the 2000s, the Backstreet Boys faded from the charts, trading stadium-scale hysteria for more theatres and casinos.
Now, with their original fans approaching middle age, Welychka reckons they’re yearning for a time when their biggest responsibility was keeping a Tamagotchi alive.
“It’s a different day and age now. It’s a lot more frustrating,” says Welychka, citing unemployment and the cost-of-living crisis.
“A lot of people want to get those feelings back you once had. If you’re a 45-year-old woman and screaming and crying, nothing wrong with that.”
SAME CRUSHES, BIGGER ALLOWANCES
Eleni Papamichelakis knows the feeling. The 39-year-old Durham Region mother drifted away from the Backstreet Boys as adulthood took over, only to rediscover her teenage obsession when she caught their Sphere residency last year. Now she’s taking her 11-year-old daughter to see the group, just as she did at that age in 1998.
Part of the appeal is revisiting a pre-smartphone era, when having fun just required a CD and some friends to dance with.
“The world and, like, life has changed and it’s become so digital and sometimes a little bit impersonal,” says the mortgage agent.
“We lived in such a fun era where we had to kind of entertain ourselves.”
A grown-up bank account helps, though: “We have the money to go and see these concerts in a better seat than when we were younger.”
Not every artist is benefiting from that spending power.
The concert industry has been grappling with so-called “blue dot fever,” named for the unsold seats dotting Ticketmaster seating charts.
This year, Meghan Trainor scrapped her tour, Zayn Malik cancelled his U.S. dates and Post Malone scaled back his stadium run. Though the artists cited varying reasons, the cancellations have fuelled speculation about sluggish ticket sales.
The Backstreet Boys, meanwhile, are once again larger than life at the box office. Their Toronto residency could draw nearly half a million concertgoers, with tickets ranging from around $100 to well over $1,000 for VIP packages.
Nostalgia has always sold concert tickets. But Scott Henderson, a professor of popular culture at Trent University, says it’s becoming an increasingly vital draw for major venues amid an uncertain touring market.
“It’s kind of fuelling the industry in ways it never used to,” Henderson says. “That used to be a separate market, that nostalgia market. Now it’s what big venues like the Rogers Centre are going to have to look for.”
Sentimental millennials, he says, now have deeper pockets and a willingness to splurge on premium tickets.
“That’s your guaranteed audience.”
For Vanessa Capozi, a 39-year-old Montreal-area mother of two, the Backstreet Boys offer something priceless: a break from adulthood.
“Life has taken over right now,” says the special education technician. “Rarely do people my age take time for themselves.”
But when her favourite boy band hits the stage, she gets to be 15 again.
“For those two hours, nothing else exists. I’m just there as me, that teenager, watching the Backstreet Boys.”
